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Comment by nathan-wall | Hacker News Reader

> Chess problems with 5 pieces on the board. How helpful would practicing these be to solving problems with 6 pieces?

Another anecdote: I experienced a noticeable improvement in my abilities at Chess by studying and playing Go. I'm still not real good at Chess because I haven't studied it, but I can now beat people I didn't used to be able to beat.

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I've had a similar experience where playing Go made be better at living life, and being away from the game and living made me better at Go when I expected to be set back. This probably only applies at kyu levels but I did find it surprising.

A completely arbitrary related concept: I'm much better at running my startup now than before I played StarCraft seriously.

StarCraft made me a more strategic thinker and it's why I think it might not surprise people that Emmett Shear (ceo of twitch) is really good at StarCraft.

I played casually in the early days, but a few years back I wanted to get decent enough to play online regularly, and it changed our company for the better.

Is it your skill at StarCraft, or could it be that you developed strategies for learning, resilience, etc while trying get better, and those are the actual success factors?

Conceptual stretching is my guess. More strategy than normal for me.

Do you micro the workers or focus on the macro game?

Macro

Sounds like Go is the Lisp of board games?

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

It will be a similar enlightenment experience with Haskell?

> playing Go made be better at living life

Would you mind talking about that some more, please?

If you want to hear something similar from someone who achieved a very high level in chess, I'd highly recommend reading Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning.

Do you know specifically how your play changed?

As I said, I'm not a strong chess player and don't know much about strategies. I think my reading ability is primarily what improved.

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